India: Lynchings draw upon the master narrative of cow protection promoted by the current political elites

Crime and context

Lynchings draw upon the master narrative of cow protection promoted by the current political elites

Is India’s past, so marked by communal riots, transmuting itself into
an era of lynching? Of immense political significance, this question is
now squarely in front of us all. How should we answer it? Let us start
with some background.
When the NDA regime came to power in 2014, many asked if Hindu-Muslim
riots would return. Since Independence, especially during 1977-1993, as
I statistically demonstrated in my book, Ethnic Conflict and Civic
Life: Hindus and Muslims in India, communal riots, though unevenly
spread geographically, had become a common feature of India’s national
life. But after 1993, though small incidents continued, big riots
declined, a pattern broken only twice, first in 2002 in Gujarat and next
in September 2013 in Muzaffarnagar. Because of its size and
destruction, the latter raised alarms in 2013-14. Moreover, even as it
exhilarated many quarters, the rise of Narendra Modi to power aroused anxiety in other circles.
Responding to the anxiety and using probabilistic reasoning, I argued
that big riots were unlikely to come back (IE, October 30, 2014). Of
the various reasons, two deserved registration. First, worldwide data
show that at higher levels of income, which India has relative to 1993,
rioting becomes highly episodic, as opposed to occurring repeatedly.
Central tendencies, of course, don’t apply to each case, but they are
worth noting as correlations.
Second, while Hindu-Muslim polarisation would be in the political
interest of the BJP, widespread rioting was not. Riots would be too
disruptive of order, likely to upset those who voted for the BJP for
economics, governance and Modi’s leadership, not for its Hindu
nationalist ideology. According to Lokniti data, as much as a fourth of
all BJP voters in 2014 did not vote for Hindu nationalism. That was too
big an electoral bloc to antagonise via riots.
Thus, instead of riots, I argued, one should expect a standard
transmutation of prejudice witnessed elsewhere, too: In particular,
communalisation of the state’s everyday practices on the one hand and
hate crimes committed by citizens on the other. What form hate crimes
would take was unclear, but I certainly did not anticipate lynchings. It
was too ugly and alarming a prospect. Social science defines hate
crimes as mostly one-on-one hate-driven violence; lynchings represent
perpetration of mob violence against one person or a few. There are
countries where lynching, as a form of collective violence, is common,
and has been studied. India was not one such country.
The larger literature points to two categories of lynching. The first
aims at restoring routine order via mob violence. Studies of lynching
in Indonesia show that until recently, most of it was aimed at punishing
theft, hit-and-run accidents, rape, adultery and witchcraft (Bridget
Welsh, Journal of East Asian Studies, September 2008). Instead of using
the police, many Indonesians used mob violence as a disciplining
mechanism. It had no ethnic or religious core.
The second category of lynching aims at enforcing a majoritarian
ethnic/racial/religious political order. During 1880-1930, especially in
the American South, white mobs lynched black Americans if they crossed a
certain historically embedded hierarchical boundary (Marilyn K. Howard
in Encyclopedia of American Race Riots, 2007). In her song, Strange
Fruit, Billie Holiday immortalised the crushing pain of such violence.
Its haunting opening verse was: “Southern trees bear a strange fruit/
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root/ Black bodies swinging in the
southern breeze/ Strange fruit hanging from the poplar tree.”
Is India going the Indonesian, or the late 19th century American,
way? It is unquestionably the latter. To be sure, Muslims are not the
only target of lynching. But they are its primary object. Recently
constructed datasets on lynching show a qualitative increase in the
incidence of lynching after the BJP’s rise to power in 2014. The big new
issue is not anomic, ordinary criminality, built around traffic deaths,
robbery and theft, which India has certainly witnessed, though not as
much as Indonesia. The new issue is beef and cattle trade, both
explicitly connected to the Hindu nationalist project.
Unlike blacks and whites, Muslims are not racially different from the
Hindus. But the more observant Muslims can be easily identified by
their dress, as in the case of Junaid Khan; intimate knowledge of where
they live can also make mob attacks on Muslims precise, as in Dadri; and
while beef eating or cattle trade in India is not confined to Muslims,
they are among the biggest practitioners of both, and can be easily
targeted as such, as the killings in Jharkhand, Rajasthan and Haryana
show.
Some commentators suggest that routine criminals are the instigators,
not Hindu nationalists. This statement may be partly right on the
surface, but is awfully wrong at a deeper analytical level. Over the
last two decades, the vast research on riots, to which I have been a
contributor, and civil wars, whose best interpreter is Stathis N.
Kalyvas (Yale University), has repeatedly argued that routine
criminality, calculations and jealousies have often been inserted into
the master narrative of riots and civil wars.
Correspondingly, if the master narrative of cow protection were not
so systematically promoted by the current Indian political elite,
regular criminals would not have that narrative to plug into. The larger
ideological ecosystem enables them to go rampant.
Prime Minister Modi has spoken against lynchings only twice thus far.
His social base also knows that he picked Yogi Adityanath as UP’s chief
minister. Adityanath created the Hindu Yuva Vahini, a vigilante force;
led the campaign against “love jihad”; and formed “anti Romeo” youth
squads. How would, then, Modi’s base read his recent anti-lynching
statement? The answers would be available soon.

The writer is director, Centre for
Contemporary South Asia, Sol Goldman Professor of International Studies
and the Social Sciences, Watson Institute for International and Public
Affairs, Brown University